Tuesday, January 04, 2011

Why Scientific 'Truth' So Often Turns Out Wrong.

In AWT this phenomena can be of real emergent nature and it manifests itself with switching of intersubjectively accepted opinion into dual perspective, whenever the density of facts increases up to certain level. It's analogous to dispersive spreading of waves at the water surface, which is switching its character with distance from longitudinal into transverse waves and back into longitudinal waves again. It corresponds the layered fractally nested character of Universe and observable reality.

For example, from terrestrial perspective the epicycle model of solar system appears relevant. With increasing scope this model has been replaced with heliocentric model but now the evolution of galactic arms can be described with epicycle model again. It's just the number of observable objects, which makes epicycle or heliocentric model more relevant.

After all, the acceptation/refusal of aether model is of the same emergent evolution. Before some time old Greeks believed in Aether, later (Newton) this concept has been replaced with concept of absolute space. In 19th century the aether based models were quite popular again, but they're were replaced later with relativity model of space-time. Now the aether model is returning into physics again with model of Higgs field, which is responsible for particle mass.

The emergent character of observable reality can be understood by example of compression of gas, which is changing into fluid or even solid during this. The density fluctuations of newly formed phase are behaving like another generation of gas particles and when the compression continues, they're condensing and changing into nested fluid phase and solid again. The newly formed phase is embedded into previous generation of matter and this process can be repeated many times.

I presume, the same evolution occurs during pilling and condensation of facts into theories in hyperdimensional causal space. I Czech we have a proverb: "Stokrát nic umořilo osla" which roughly means "A hundred times nothing killed the donkey". The meaning of this proverb is, even the smallest chores are tiresome (if there is too many).

From this graph is evident, SUSY has been well dead before twenty years already, yet theorists are still investing huge amount of public money into its confirmation. SUSY failure is just one of many recent examples. So far no gravitational waves have been found. Existence of Higgs boson is highly uncertain, too. No extradimensions were found. String theory/LQG are both left unconfirmed for thirty years.. And so on - it's evident, the whole physics of the last thirty years is on the dead track. Its experts are best payed scientists in the human history - and they were all wrong.

The funny part is, most of phenomena predicted with these theories still exists and they're living well - just at another places, when their founders are expecting. We know about many forces, violating inverse square law - yet theorists are struggling with finding of extradimensions. Gravitational waves are known for years - as a cosmic background noise. Higgs fields manifests with Yukawa coupling, which is known for decades. The well known dilepton channel of top quarks decay is just the example of Higgs field symmetry, which the physicists are looking for during Higgs boson searches.

I can't do this anymore, it's too much! Here, go to this link, i'm not doing this anymore, and Zephir, I'm blaming this alll on you, and, now I don't care about grammar correcting because it's TOO MUCH! to ask of a 12 year old to do this. :(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(. And stop ARGUING with each other and just meet each other and work with each other and actuallyRESEARCH with each other instead of yapping off and maybe, just maybe you could be able to find out if this teory is true, instead of WASTING YOUR TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. too much. :(. And become SCIENTISTS. Please for yours and mines sake, PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF YOUR BICKERING, AND YOUR OWN CURIOUSITY, STOP THAT GOD DANGM BICKERING.

Search for dark matter moves one step closer to detecting elusive particleActually this result was negative, so it cannot bring us closer, but farther. But mainstream propaganda wants the public support for science, so it inverts the meaning for every episode, which could be confronted with belief of public in mistakable power of science.Another example of such bias (event the usage of word connection "God particle" can be considered propagandistic)'God particle' may be discovered soonWhat Dr Myers actually said was:"The performance of the detectors and of the machine means that even at a lower energy we could discover the Higgs or disprove its existence"

It's depressing to see that 1) whether something is publishable in high impact journals is such an important criterion for what we do, 2) skeptical science that replicates and refutes is considered a waste of effort, and 3) students are discouraged from carrying out such work, because there is some strange bias that will hurt their chances of employment.

This unwillingness is a consequence of many psychosocial factors of modern era: the increasing number of information and web twaddlers, the increasing level of competition between research groups and the fact, the physicists are motivated in continuity of research and their safe salaries, rather than in actual finding - as Bob Wilson recognized and named pregnantly. And I definitely missed many other potential reasons...

"The wise man speaks because he has something to say, the fool because he has to say something"

“The 1500-page manifesto“ (by Anders Behring Breivik) “says many things and if I were given this text before the murder and had the freedom to say what I thought about it, of course that I would agree with a significant part of it. Well, as you can see, I just indirectly said that I agree with many things in it. There are also many things I disagree with.“

“ And they may even be more efficient while killing - and the probable reason is that Breivik (or his potential counterparts) may have a higher IQ than your garden variety left-wing or Islamic terrorist.“

He's extreme nerd, who can recognize only black & white (as many formally thinking people do). So his thinking is always biased by its very nature. IMO he suffers with Asperger's syndrome. Even the graphic design of blogs and websites speaks for it...;-)

The Weak Evidence Effect: People who receive weak but supportive evidence are less optimistic about the outcome than people who receive no evidence.

Confirmed at the case of aether theory, antigravity, cold fusion, etc. (weak evidence) with compare to Higgs, gravity waves, superstrings (no evidence). Most of redditrolls (including highly qualified PhD students) tend to believe complex but solely unsupported theories rather than unverified experiments and apparent, but qualitative analogies. One of the consequences of this seeming paradox is, the unsupported theories are examined until people are exhausted and all money sources are depleted and, while no one bothers to repeat the simple cold fusion experiments, once they were impeached first.

"You are the only person with whom I am actually willing to come to terms. Almost all the other fellows do not look from the facts to the theory but from the theory to the facts; they cannot extricate themselves from a once accepted conceptual net, but only flop about in it in a grotesque way."

The less people know about important complex issues such as the economy, energy consumption and the environment,the more they want to avoid becoming well-informed, according to new research. Aether theory and cold fusion can be added to the list w/out problem.

Albert Einstein: "The greatest obstacle to understanding reality is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge." (Autoritätsdusel ist der größte Feind der Wahrheit, 1901). Then he rejected the quantum mechanics.

What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

More and more that careers in physics are hard to come by, grant very little freedom, and can be quite stressful. This article is particularly concerning: link. It's because the contemporary science, physics in particular is extremely infective, if not useless for human civilization. The physicists are ignoring cold fusion, being partially responsible for energetic and environmental crisis, whereas they're spending billions in useless hot fusion and accelerator research. They're effectively a parasites of human society by now, which is the consequence of their relative prestige during Cold war era: it were indeed just the physicists, who constructed rockets and nuclear bombs. But these times are ower. So far we have no usage for any particle revealed at collider, not to say about theories developed during last forty years, which cannot be even falsified Michio Kaku: How Physics Got Fat (And Why We Need to Sing For Our Supper)

The editors of Infection and Immunity are sending a warning signal about modern science. Two editorials (1 and 2) published in the journal have given other biomedical researchers pause to ask if modern science is dysfunctional. Readers familiar with the state of academia may not be surprised but the claims have been presented today to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) that level the following allegations: "Incentives have evolved over the decades to encourage some behaviors that are detrimental to good science" and "The surest ticket to getting a grant or job is getting published in a high profile journal, this is an unhealthy belief that can lead a scientist to engage in sensationalism and sometimes even dishonest behavior to salvage their career." The data to back up such slanderous claims? "In the past decade the number of retraction notices for scientific journals has increased more than 10-fold while the number of journals articles published has only increased by 44%." At least a few of such retractions have been covered here.

[url=http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/06/01/1937220/why-we-have-so-much-duh-science]Why We Have So Much "Duh" Science[/url]. Symmetrically, the research of really fundamental, but controversial phenomena, like the "chi" energy and other psychic phenomena is avoided obstinately (the same tendency is observed in mainstream physics, which avoids cold fusion research, etc..). The reason is simple: the community of social scientists is overgrown, so it tends to superficial journalisms and it avoids every risk of carrier. The contemporary scientists are product of long-term evolution in this extent.

Father of String Theory and noted physics scientist Holger Bech Neilsen of Denmark has said that contributions from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN are over-rated and that there is no need for spending so much on the experiment. Is the LHC throwing away too much data? I wouldn't further comment it, because my stance regarding the LHC research is quite known over the web (you know, all these foggy landscapes and water surface stuffs).

Society: How is it possible so many scientist be wrong Roland Benabou of Princeton have made many papers using a model of "self delusion" that can became "collective"... he studied many variation and application of his theory to explain illogical facts..Psychologists over the past 50 years have demonstrated the sheer genius people have at convincing themselves of congenial conclusions while denying the truth of inconvenient ones. You can call it self-deception, but it also goes by the names rationalization, wishful thinking, defensive processing, self-delusion, and motivated reasoning. There is a robust catalogue of strategies people follow to believe what they want to, and we research psychologists are hardly done describing the shape or the size of that catalogue. All this rationalization can lead people toward false beliefs, or perhaps more commonly, to tenaciously hang on to false beliefs they should really reconsider. Psychologists over the past 50 years have demonstrated the sheer genius people have at convincing themselves of congenial conclusions while denying the truth of inconvenient ones. You can call it self-deception, but it also goes by the names rationalization, wishful thinking, defensive processing, self-delusion, and motivated reasoning. There is a robust catalogue of strategies people follow to believe what they want to, and we research psychologists are hardly done describing the shape or the size of that catalogue. All this rationalization can lead people toward false beliefs, or perhaps more commonly, to tenaciously hang on to false beliefs.

Find it or not, science wins. That's the great thing about science.. Everything wins at the very end by trial and error approach. Construction of cars converges to the optimal value, when all possible designs were tested and found unsuccessful. Is it what the scientific approach means? Even Holy Church accepted the heliocentric model of solar system at the very end. Should we call it a victory of Holy Church? Should we call the victory of Science, if it will admit the Steady state Universe, cold fusion or dense aether model at the very end (while failing in all attempts to deny/ignore it during it)? What actually wins here is the truth only - not the community of scientists, which can be as biased, as the community of religious laymans. What we are paying the physicists for is more insightful approach, than just failure in denial of all opposite ideas.

Unfortunately, the more reliable theory is, the more fuzzy it becomes in its predictions. Such a theory is right at 99% situation, but only to 55%. Whereas the very exact theories are of narrow validity scope.

Province cartoonist Dan Murphy wrote a column questioning the value of hunting for the Higgs boson, when humankind has so many other pressing problems to solve. Response of Tim Meyer, a physicist at TRIUMF. Pointless research is maybe good, but non-pointless research is always better. I'm not worrying the money spend into extreme research in physics (particle collisions) or biology (GMO viruses), my problem rather is with dangerous aspects of this research. We should do it outside in cosmic space at the safe distance from Earth. If we cannot do it safely from financial reasons, then it's an indicia, this research is pointless as well, because we have no money for its utilization, not to say about handling of its accidental consequences. But what I cannot tolerate at all is the ignorance if not hostile approach of physicists toward really useful findings like the cold fusion. It just illustrates the well known fact, if you give some group of people too much power and money, this group will separate from the interests of people and it will become hostile toward the rest of society, which is feeding it. The contemporary physics is overgrown remnant of Cold war era, when physicists got controversial credit, money and respect for construction of nuclear weapons. But these times are over and now we're facing a huge community of people, who would have no other occupation and they're become a parasites of human society. The fact, these parasites are quite agile makes the things even worse.

The Crisis in Physics is due to following factors: 1) Mainstream science suppresses all competing theories. 2) The university teaching is wrong; 3) Absence of criticism. 4) Perhaps the crisis in physics is caused by "evolution in reverse" of human race.

There's a write-up, which proposes seven reasons, why scientists are basically cheating. Some of them are: the successful grant applications are increasingly being treated by universities as outputs - academic journals prioritize the publication of novel results, and they're resistant to the publication of null results or replication studies. Time constrains on getting papers out may result in questionable "data-fishing" techniques, too. Of course, these long term factors don't explain, why the retraction peaks in recent years so rapidly..

A lost generation? M. Shifman provides an "impressionistic portrait" of the current state of particle theory. I wouldn't call the contemporary physicists a "lost generation" - rather the generation which completely misunderstood the practical meaning of its own insights.

Why kids have an inflated sense of their science skills. "A massive analysis of some 350,000 students in 53 countries has uncovered a paradox: Students in many countries that are mediocre at science have an inflated sense of good they are." IMO it's evolutionary trait. The young people are optimized into learnings of many facts in shortest time - so that their thinking is very selective and schematic - in the same way, like the contemporary education system of science, which presents only very schematic facts as a picture of the whole branch of science. It's not accidental in this point, that the dense aether theory based on nonformal thinking is unpalatable for many redditors here, who are mostly youngsters. Every new more general theory deals just with exceptions from established theories preferably - and these young kids don't know about any - the teachers at schools didn't told it to them. For these kids such a theory has therefore no tangible motivation.With compare to it, the older people already know, that every rule has its own exceptions, so that they're more trustful and willing to accept the informations outside of the established schemes, often non-critically. It's not accidental, the cold fusion conferences are attended mostly with elderly scientists.

Yep, exactly. If the scientists don't value the logic, only the math equations (which were itself derived with using of this logics too, btw) - how one could convince them into using of logic with logical arguments? For example, the equations describing the motion of planets in heliocentric and geocentric models are very different, yet they provide the same results. How to convince the people, that one kind of equations is better than the another, when they don't consider anything, which cannot be computed in many orders of precision?

Data releasedsuggest that, given the choice, even researchers who publish in open-access journals want to place restrictions on how their papers can be re-used — for example, sold by others for commercial profit.

Are We Doing Science the Right Way? Is the push to publish ruining scientific discovery? Is science really self-correcting? Does peer review work? Are labs the right size? Does the quest for grants create a climate that encourages misconduct?

The Folly of Scientism: Though physicists might once have been dismissive of metaphysics as mere speculation, they would also have characterized such questions as inherently speculative and so beyond their own realm of expertise. The claims of Hawking and Mlodinow, and many other writers, thus represent a striking departure from the traditional view.

Illusion of invulnerability – Creates excessive optimism that encourages taking extreme risks.Collective rationalization – Members discount warnings and do not reconsider their assumptions.Belief in inherent morality – Members believe in the rightness of their cause and therefore ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions.Stereotyped views of out-groups – Negative views of “enemy” make effective responses to conflict seem unnecessary.Direct pressure on dissenters – Members are under pressure not to express arguments against any of the group’s views.Self-censorship – Doubts and deviations from the perceived group consensus are not expressed.Illusion of unanimity – The majority view and judgments are assumed to be unanimous.Self-appointed ‘mindguards’ – Members protect the group and the leader from information that is problematic or contradictory to the group’s cohesiveness, view, and/or decisions.

Ridiculed discoveries, vindicated mavericks I constantly hear that the number of breakthroughs from crackpots is relatively tiny, or that "vindicated mavericks" are the exception. But we need to be careful with this. After all, the number of uneducated crazy people is enormous, but this has little impact on the statistics regarding new ideas in professional science. It's not honest to ask how many crazy ideas are actually crazy. Instead ask how many CRAZY FUNDING PROPOSALS from SUCCESSFUL SCIENTISTS have turned out to be genuinely crazy. I'm guessing that the number is quite low. Perhaps the number of vindicated crazy research projects is so high, that it's larger than the number of genuinely crazy research projects. So, if you're going to dismiss or scoff at some crazy idea without bothering to first take an unbiased look ...at least make sure the idea is from a common crackpot. Make damn certain that "the crazy" isn't coming from a professional scientist who is trying to fund a research project to test that idea. "Men show their character in nothing more clearly than by what they think laughable." -J. W. Goethe "When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." - Jonathan Swift

The Twilight of the Scientific AgeThe dense aether model provides the geometrical explanation for the contemporary wave of distrust in mainstream science. Our Universe appears like the water surface after splash being observed with its own ripples. While at the proximity the water surface appears chaotic and unpredictable, the ripples spreading along it will get gradually their deterministic character of regular circles, so that the more deterministic approach we will use for the reality description, the better predictions we get. This is the reason, why formal approach of science of the last century has celebrated so big and well deserved success.In AWT the scope of deterministic zone in the Universe is determined with distance/energy density scale of symmetrical objects - the spherical atom nuclei and dense stars composed mostly of atom nuclei. Just for these objects (and/or the fields around them) the contemporary math of science works best.But when the spreading of surface ripples continues, the scattering effect will prevail again and the regular ripple circles will fragment into many chaotic waves. The contemporary achievement of technology has enabled us to see farther, than the strictly deterministic approach allows - and many proclamative truths of recent decades are getting questioned again. As we know, the very small and large objects in our universe aren't deterministic and pretty spherical anymore, and the low-dimensional deterministic model fail in their description in similar way, like in the description at common life phenomena at the human scale.

Why do physicists gravitate towards jobs in finance?Things rapidly spiral out of control whenever we try to study systems with a large number of components because it is then impossible to keep track of everything.It's effect of existing financial crisis, which was induced with Iraq war, which was motivated with energetic crisis (it's typical oil war), which was caused with many years standing ignorance of cold fusion findings just with physicists. So that the physicists are paying for their ignorance right now. And quite frankly, they really deserve it, because the physicists transformed into conservative community, which hinders the further progress in the areas, which would require to reformulate the existing theories and which would compete the existing research of various methods of energy production/conversion/transport and storage.But in AWT this trend is of deeper origin, based on geometry of observable reality, i.e. it's not just a momentary trend. It doesn't explain, why physicists are leaving the physics and seeking job in financial sphere, which suffered with the same crisis. In AWT the observable reality observed with light waves appears like the water surface observed with its own ripples. At the proximity these ripples are pretty circular and easily described with math. I.e. the more math we're using, the more predictions we will get.But with increasing distance from human observer scale these ripples undergo scattering and their spreading is not regular anymore. From this moment the application of math becomes the more misleading, the more math you'll use. The SUSY, string and LQG theories all face the deep failures. And whole the years, which the young physicists spend with learning of math are suddenly rendered useless and wasted. So that the physicists are seeking another occupation, where they could find at least partial usage for their qualification.

The Case against Public Science The society should bribe the scientists so that their discoveries are more likely to be used to benefit the society and not against it. If we realize, that the actual findings and practical application come just from private research - if not garage scientists - (cold fusion) and the results of basic research rather conserve one hundred years misunderstandings, then I'm rather inclined to defund public science as a whole.

A couple of weeks before the deadline for new grant proposals in political science were due,the NSF has canceled the program, at least for this grant cycle. Back in March, Congress passed the Coburn Amendment to the Continuing Appropriations Act of 2013, which limits political science funding to research that “promotes national security or the economic interests of the United States.” That’s almost impossible standard to demonstrate, so the NSF just canceled all of the funding, rather than invite endless Congressional hearings about this or that grant proposal.

Phlogiston and other discarded science: Hasok Chang (Cambridge) makes the case for scientific pluralism (the development of multiple theories for one phenomena) and the value of the history of science. [74:25]

Let’s Stop Using the Word “Scientism” The working definition of “scientism” is “the belief that science is the right approach to use in situations where science actually isn’t the right approach at all.”

Thomas Szasz is a psychiatrist and author well known for his criticism of the modern psychiatry movement. He once wrote in 1974: "Since theocracy is the rule of God or its priests, and democracy the rule of the people or of the majority, pharmacy is therefore the rule of medicine or of doctors." Not surprisingly, just the medical research suffers with highest incidence (nearly 90%) of retractions and publishing of misleading results. We could say, the roots of all nonscientific traits of contemporary scientific society is a corruption in some form. The physics is not immune against it too, it's just less obvious due the longer cycle of promotion and verification of facts and more emergent (but the more persistent) forms of corruption of researchers.

Schmidt was a physics PhD and reporter for Physics Today for 19 years (one of their best). He wrote a scathing critique of the way in which the physics PhD program trains physicists. The American Institute of Physics fired him for the book, and he sued. After many hundreds of researchers (plus one Noam Chomsky) signed their names in his defense, a very large settlement was reached in his favor.

Scott Aaronson: Have you looked recently at beyond-Standard-Model theoretical physics? It's a teetering tower of conjectures (which is not to say, of course, that that's inherently bad, or that I can do better). However, one obvious difference is that the physicists don't call them conjectures, as mathematicians or computer scientists would. Instead they call them amazing discoveries, striking dualities, remarkable coincidences, tantalizing hints … once again, lots of good PR lessons for us! As for beauty and simplicity, I dare say that those are the common currency of all mathematical fields. We all look for those, and are all thrilled when we occasionally find them.

Peer Review failure:Science and Nature journals reject papers because they “have to be wrong. The peer review system is failing us — Science and Nature missed a whopper of a study. If you do revolutionary work, send it somewhere else.

The scientists managed to ignore the cold fusion eighty years and now they're surprised, that the society has no money for their toys and grants. This is indeed a hypocritical stance. The medical research is not any better in this regard, as it's mostly driven with Big Pharma lobby. If we consider, more than 90% of medical research fails, then there is a relevant question, if it has a meaning to allow such a research survive. The science itself isn't self-saving, if the society has no money for application of its results. It particularly applies just for results of medical research, which become increasingly inaccessible even for middle class (1, 2). The ineffectiveness and over-occupation in research is one of culprits here. According to a July study in the Journal of the American Medicine Association, U.S. health-care system is broken. More than 48 million people lack health insurance, and despite having the world's highest levels of health-care spending per capita, the U.S. has some of the worst health outcomes among developed nations, lagging behind in key metrics like life expectancy, premature death rates, and death by treatable diseases. The reason is not too little spending in science, but way too much high expenses into research into account of practical implementation of its results. The players of strategical games like the Civilization or Warcraft already know quite well, it has no meaning to spend all resources into scientific research and healing clinics, if they have no one to heal.

The complex role of citations as measure of scientific quality. The problem with mainstream science, at this moment, is that there is a widespread perception (confusion for some) that there is only one worldview in science worth talking about -- the one which aligns with consensus. Scientometrics reinforces this false premise in science.

Revision of Helsinki Ethical Principles: The proportion of clinical trials that report negative outcomes continues to decline, and there’s little doubt that this stems from selective reporting, not improvement in the design and evaluation of interventions. Need to make science more honest again.

The Fundamental Physics prize continues to be bad for physics.Perhaps the world of physics needs another Ernest Rutherford. When asked what he thought of theorists he famously retorted, “You theorists play games with your symbols, but we are the ones who discover the secrets of the universe”. I dunno if it needs him, but what I know for sure is, when facing such an option, it dismisses it obstinately.

20 Tips for Analyzing Claims of a Scientific Study Some criterions are relevant, some others are misleading and they may even lead into formulation of new Crackpot indexes and Malleus Maleficarum books - i.e. the formal fringe tools, which allow to judge the scientific work without bothering about its actual content. For example the requirement of replications can be quite negatively misleading, as the findings which are threatening the position of many scientists at the same moment are often ignored in quiet and refused to replicate (the cold fusion findings as a typical example).

"Even in the highly rationalised science community, people are susceptible to a social-psychological phenomenon like pluralistic ignorance, where every researcher and policymaker individually may doubt the promises made by a particular research programme but also wrongly believe that everybody else is convinced of its robustness; so they all end up collectively supporting a dubious programme which subsequently receives generous funding," professor Hendricks says and concludes: "When researchers choose to ignore their private information and instead mimick the actions of researchers before them, they initialise a so-called lemming effect in which everybody publishes in the same journals and applies for funding for the same type of projects. Such a scientific bubble will eventually bust when the programmes' scientific explanations are put to the test, but the problem is that they may already have drained the research system from resources. And then the system will be faced with an investor confidence crisis."

Peter Higgs doubts that a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today’s academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: “It’s difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964.”

This conference is a return to rational physics in terms that are comprehensible to any educated person, not just a small group of specialists. Contemporary physics has lost contact with physical reality. Mysticism and fancy has resulted in quite irrational notions being proposed to account for the physical Universe.

In a huge, grandiose convention center I found about 200 extremely conventional-looking scientists, almost all of them male and over 50. In fact some seemed over 70, and I realized why: The younger ones had bailed years ago, fearing career damage from the cold fusion stigma. I have tenure, so I don't have to worry about my reputation. But if I were an assistant professor, I would think twice about getting involved. Actually the modern scientists avoid the controversial topics like the devil is afraid of the cross. Only these established ones or those aged ones (who already have nothing to lose) are brave enough for to pursue new routes of research. For those who don't believe me - this is how LENR workshops and conferences looks like (1, 2, 3,...). Just show me some young people there...

The urge to publish in top journals is harming research: "In keeping with the current winner-takes-all economics of science, impact factor mania benefits a few, creates many losers, and distorts the process of science" For example, the high impact journals officially don't accept the experimental work without formal theory and or cold fusion/LENR research.